The burning number b(G) of a graph G is used for measuring the speed of contagion in a graph. In this paper, we study the burning number of the generalized Petersen graph P(n, k). We show that for any fixed positive integer k, \(\lim _{n\rightarrow \infty } \frac{b(P(n,k))}{\sqrt{\frac{n}{k}}}=1\). Furthermore, we give tight bounds for b(P(n, 1)) and b(P(n, 2)).